Swan Lakes at the Kremlin

Christina Ezrahi SWANS OF THE KREMLIN Ballet and power in Soviet Russia 338pp. University of Pittsburgh Press. Paperback, $27.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £19.99.978 1 852 73158 8

Published: 27 February 2013

I
n December 2012, Russian social websites were buzzing with a story from a
Moscow writer who had been part of a delegation to the Committee of Culture
of the Russian State Duma. During the meeting, a young woman with “steely
eyes” had suddenly “drilled out”: “You must understand: art should be the
expression of party values!”. Since the Committee, like the Duma itself, is
essentially an instrument of the policies of United Russia, Russia’s ruling
party, this pronouncement caused understandable alarm among those who do not
support the party’s views. The parroting of Soviet-era jargon by a person
who was probably in primary school when the old regime collapsed served more
to threaten than to amuse.

Yet members of Russia’s creative community can probably rest safe in their
beds. The current Russian government may hanker for the centrist control and
supposed consensus of the Brezhnev era, from which it takes the buzzword
“stability”, but it has so far not taken the essential step of providing
funding to match its ideological ambitions. Efforts to condemn artistic
events (such as the exhibition by the Chapman Brothers at the Hermitage in
2012) are considerably less effective when the financial support for
institutions also comes from sponsors beyond the government. In turn, the
stark dwindling of state largesse since the early 1990s has had a
retrospective impact on the way that the cultural politics of the Soviet
period are understood. The view that creative artists – not just talentless
hacks – could be beneficiaries of Soviet government and Party institutions,
and at some level collaborators in, and indeed creators of, the artistic
policies that regulated their lives, is now widely accepted. It is
generating a thorough-going reassessment of the arts, particularly the
performing arts, which are vulnerable to economic pressures in any society,
and where the issues of artistic autonomy are therefore especially vexed.

If in the 1970s and 80s, study of the relationship between creative artists
and the Soviet government and Party institutions mainly focused on
repressive mechanisms (with excellent work on literary censorship by, for
example, Martin Dewhirst), recent research has turned to the work of the
creative unions, to patronage networks, and to the importance of key
officials in shaping ideological concerns and policy decisions. There is
much left to do; there is, for example, no complete biography of Platon
Kerzhentsev, who played a vital role in the development of Soviet agitprop
in the 1920s and 30s, and who figures significantly in Marina Frolova-Walker
and Jonathan Walker’s new collection of documents, Music and Soviet
Power, 1917–1932. But such books as Jan Plamper’s study of the
impact of the Stalin cult on the visual arts, The Alchemy of Power
(see TLS, June 29, 2012), or Katharina Kucher’s Der
Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im Stalinismus 1928–1941, have joined
earlier work by scholars of Soviet film, literature and culture such as
Katerina Clark, Denise Youngblood and Sheila Fitzpatrick, in reassessing the
nature of the accommodation made by Soviet intellectuals with what people
might now hesitate to call “the system”, given that the unpredictability and
instability of Soviet power relations are among the principal contentions
put forward.

Frolova-Walker and Walker specifically mention Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work as an
influence on theirs, and their introductory articles follow her in
emphasizing the fluidity of musical politics in the 1920s. In the late
1920s, the main story (as usually in accounts of the decade) is the rise of
the formidably aggressive organizations of a “class war” orientation, such
as the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). However, as
Frolova-Walker and Walker’s selection of materials and their incisive, lucid
framing sections make clear, there are no heroes in this narrative. Nikolai
Roslavets, a leading light in the Association for Contemporary Music (ASM),
happened to be married to a senior officer in the GPU, the Soviet secret
police force, and close associate of Felix Dzerzhinsky, which assured him
protection – until he and Natalya Roslavets split up. While shouts of “class
war” were shrill and hence easily heard, more conservative forces in the
arts were quietly building their own institutional power bases. At the end
of 1931, the composer Mikhail Gnesin made a brave stand against bullying
from RAPM – but the crucial turning point in his opposition to the
Association came when he wrote what in other contexts might be called a
“denunciation” to Stalin, reporting frankly on what he saw as wrong in the
world of music. This was an example of a general pattern by which, as the
editors of Music and Soviet Power put it, “the rigours of these years had
made [musicians] much more amenable to Stalinisation”.

Frolova-Walker and Walker treat the experiments of the 1920s with a marked
degree of irony. Persimfans, the (in)famous conductor-less orchestra, was,
they remark, not just “a model workshop for the Communist future” (as
described, rather romantically, by the historian Richard Stites). It was “a
novelty act, a joint stock company, a cottage industry run from a small
apartment with little or no state subsidy – in short, a typical NEP
enterprise”. And the story that can be teased out of the documents published
here does not speak simply of ever-growing repression. For instance, the
music criticism that makes up the core of Music and Soviet Power
underwent a marked degree of professionalization just when attitudes were
becoming more restrictive. It is not until the late 1920s, to judge by this
selection, that musical works started to be discussed by writers who paid
attention to issues such as tonality and structure, rather than only to the
class affiliation of its composer or other markers of in-group membership.
At the same time, the costs of “normalization” are also made clear, and the
editors pay scrupulous attention to providing documentary record of certain
musical experiments that are generally referred to only in passing, and
usually inaccurately, such as Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of [Factory]
Sirens, staged in Baku and Petrograd during 1922.

The difficulty with sources such as the reviews collected here lies precisely
in their immediacy: they express primarily the petty envies and minor
differences of opinion that counted at the time. This type of historical
record constantly prompts its own distracting counterfactuals. However, a
major narrative theme is the steady decline of idealism, and a growing sense
of desperation about whether path-breaking Soviet art was in fact possible.

In sharp contrast to Music and Soviet Power, Christina Ezrahi’s study
of the ballet, Swans of the Kremlin, precisely does choose to make a
case for the autonomy of the arts as expressed “between the lines”. Her
book, supported by administrative documents held in Moscow and St Petersburg
archives, as well as memoirs and contemporary reviews, sets out to address
the question posed in her introduction, “What was the creative process in
the world of Soviet ballet really like?”. This “world”, as portrayed by
Ezrahi, was one in which the state’s presence was felt mainly in terms of
interference and obstruction, and where “a public image of regime loyalty
could mask ideologically suspect artistic loyalties”. The picture here is
very different from the definition given by Gnesin back in 1931, which
suggests, rather, a great deal of confusion: “What is now Marxist will
become non-Marxist next year” (as quoted by Frolova-Walker and Walker).
Instead, we witness choreographers, artistic directors and artists who knew
very well what was wanted of them, but who chose to bend the rules as much
as they could.

Gayane had a significant Soviet afterlife as a kind of national-dancing spectacular

This difference in the understanding of the relationship between “art” and
“power” is in part traceable to the fact that Swans of the Kremlin mainly
deals with a different period to Music and Soviet Power. Ezrahi does
provide a sketch of the pre-war years in her opening chapter, but her
discussion subsequently focuses on the early post-Stalin era (1954–68). (The
years of the Great Patriotic War, when ballet companies took their expertise
to the provincial cities where they were evacuated, such as Perm, are an
unexplained absence, as are the late 1940s.) But Ezrahi herself offers a
different explanation for why the history of ballet should be seen in its
own terms. This, as she often emphasizes, is a highly specific art form and
one not suited to the kind of political engagement that Soviet leaders
expected from the high-profile spectacles they were so lavishly supporting.
Notably absent from the archival records, at least as cited by Ezrahi, is
the kind of complaint about shortage of cash that one regularly finds in,
say, materials dealing with the preservation of architectural heritage: how
to square the financial circle does not seem to have been a question that
worried ballet’s artistic directors.

Still, the privileged status of the ballet is not Ezrahi’s main theme, though
she does include an amusing vignette of how watching Swan Lake for
the nth time became an inescapable duty for Soviet leaders (drawing ironic
comments from Nikita Khrushchev). Rather than assess this art form’s
peculiar position vis-à-vis the Soviet establishment, Ezrahi is primarily
concerned to emphasize the fundamentally wrong-headed nature of efforts to
modernize the ballet, Soviet-style. A central argument is that the
drambalet, the narrative genre introduced to the Soviet stage in the 1920s,
was based on “flawed” theoretical premisses, being “essentially a
condemnation of pure dance in the name of logically developed and
realistically presented dramatic content”. The rise of what Ezrahi terms,
following dance theorists of the 1920s, “choreographic symphonism” did not,
therefore, represent merely a shift in artistic taste (a point that would be
hard to contest). It represented a move back towards the true nature of
ballet, a recognition of its inalienable essence. As Ezrahi puts it, “The
quick disappearance of ballets on contemporary Soviet topics probably
reflected both the artists’ and the audiences’ attitudes towards these
ballets”. She cites the case of a factory worker attending a conference for
members of the public at the Kirov in 1963 who, having heard of plans to
base either an opera or ballet on the recent play, Story from Irkutsk,
flatly announced, “I don’t want to see either the one or the other”.

Yet the vicissitudes of taste were perhaps more complex than Ezrahi’s account
would suggest. Gayane (1942), created by the Kirov Ballet to a score
by Khachaturian, was set on a Soviet Armenian cotton plantation, but this
did not stop it having a significant Soviet afterlife as a kind of
national-dancing spectacular. It is, arguably, neither more nor less
watchable than Shurale (1950), based by Leonid Yakobson on a Tatar
folk tale, and dealing with a magical romance. There was, moreover, an
international context for the problems of creating “modern” narrative
ballets to be danced in classical style, at least when it came to pleasing
audiences. The worker who repudiated Story from Irkutsk also
announced, “I can watch a ballet once or twice, but the opera Carmen
I watched fifteen times” – the kind of comment that would have irritated
artistic directors across most of the world, not just in Russia.

It has to be admitted that some of the ballets Ezrahi discusses really do
sound like turkeys straight off the Soviet battery farm. Native Fields,
first produced in 1953, had a classic “boy meets tractor” plot: “Andrei,
nephew of the kolkhoz director, loves Galya, a Komosomol girl. He declares
his love but has to leave for Moscow to study. A scene follows depicting the
study of the kolkhoz against heat and drought . . . . Galia is now the
leader of the Komsomol brigade . . . . Andrei decides to put all his
knowledge and efforts toward speeding up the construction of the
hydroelectric power station”. The ballet’s own wattage was not impressive,
and its lights flickered out after just one season.

Swans of the Kremlin also contains much material that evades Ezrahi’s
own main line of argument – for example, a fascinating chapter about the
Bolshoi Ballet’s tour to London in 1956. This suffered its share of
bureaucratic foul-ups, above all, the denial of permission to travel to the
ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, whose father had been executed in 1938, a
decision that left her fellow ballerinas, particularly Galina Ulanova, with
a nearly inhuman schedule of performances. But it was to be a revelatory
experience for British audiences, as Ezrahi demonstrates with a moving
quotation from the memoirs of Antoinette Sibley. The British ballerina,
recalling a rehearsal she was allowed to watch, described Ulanova’s
transformation from a granny in shawls to the fourteen-year-old Juliet as
“the sort of miracle that it is to have a baby . . . a God-given thing”. And
Ezrahi’s final two chapters present, in illuminating detail, the complex
processes by which two of the most important and innovative stagings of the
1960s, Leonid Yakobson’s The Bedbug (after Mayakovsky) and Yuri
Grigorovich’s Spartacus, were created, interpreted and
received, both by the critical establishment and by the wider public.
Admittedly, Ezrahi fails to consider whether Yakobson and Grigorovich, two
of the most successful choreographers and ballet masters of the post-Stalin
era, may actually have relished the challenge to produce modern, innovative,
“Soviet” work that was raised by a 1957 decree “On Measures for the Further
Development of Soviet Ballet Art”, but she does give their achievements due
recognition.

In the end, Ezrahi’s original question – “What was the creative process in the
world of Soviet ballet really like?” – is, of course, unanswerable.
Certainly, we will not find the solution to the riddle by trying to
second-guess what people “actually” meant when taking part in minuted
discussions of the Artistic Council of the Kirov Theatre, important as these
are in understanding how the theatre went about selecting the ballets that
were staged during its artistic seasons. Necessarily, both Swans of the
Kremlin and Music and Soviet Power leave aside the issue of how
art forms, in the most fundamental way, are created – by the struggle of a
gifted individual with the technical challenges of producing a piece of
music or a ballet, and with a particular set of emotional and intellectual
issues (whether these happen to be attached to a love story, or, say, to the
national tragedy of the losses of war). But both these books enrich the
developing sense of how Soviet artists worked with and against the official
dictates of their time, and how they responded to the incidental squabbles
and long-term preoccupations with which they had to contend. The fact that
both also provide some vastly entertaining examples of the kind of
bone-headed rhetoric still directed at adventurous work in the arts today
(and not just in Russia) is what one might term an expected, but still
welcome, bonus.

Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at New College, Oxford. Her
books include Comrade Pavlik: The rise and fall of a Soviet boy hero, 2005,
and Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991, 2007. Her book on
memory in Leningrad and St Petersburg is due to be published later this
year.